He’s politically dumb and his campaign is run by amateurs. He doesn’t have a message and doesn’t know how to deliver a message. He’s a political let-down running on auto-pilot who needs to grab the controls. He’s a man whom only friends, relatives and fellow Mormons will ever love. And his name is Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for President of the United States.

These are stinging jabs. All were made in the past week and all share one surprising thing in common: they were delivered not from the Obama campaign’s Chicago attack machine, as you might expect, but in a succession of punches from the Right.

Conservative pundits and editorial columns, senior Republicans and two of the big beasts of the business world – Rupert Murdoch and the former talismanic chief executive of General Electric, Jack Welch – have all voiced serious misgivings about Mr Romney’s ability to deliver victory in November.

The ferocity of the public criticism is a sign of the level of frustration with the former boss of private equity firm Bain Capital. America is hurting, manufacturing earnings are slowing fast, middle-class incomes are stagnating, the economic recovery is stalling, unemployment is at 8.2 per cent when Obama promised it would be 5.6 per cent: measured by historical precedent, Mr Romney is facing the equivalent of an electoral open goal, but the latest polls show that he is failing to score points off Mr Obama in those battleground states that decide elections.

The primary charge against Mr Romney is one of passivity. Those on the Right who believe that they have the economic arguments to kick-start the US economy – to make it “morning again in America” as the inspiring Ronald Reagan advert put it – find Mr Romney’s apparent inability to seize the day maddening. It’s what explains not just the criticism, but the contemptuous tone. The Wall Street Journal charged last week that Mr Romney appeared to want to “coast” to the White House by simply repeating (as the Romney campaign does, daily) that the Obama economy is failing. “Thanks, guys,” came the bitter pay-off, “but Americans already know that.”

What conservatives want is for Mr Romney to make their case that three decades of wealth-creating, free-market, centre-Right consensus made possible by Ronald Reagan’s landslide election more than 30 years ago is now being put at risk by another four years of a big-spending, progressive tax-raising Obama administration. American families and workers are crying out for growth and Mr Romney, the turn-around chief executive, needs to set out a vision of how, after four years of failure by Mr Obama, he would achieve that.

And as Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer-prize winning columnist often described as the most influential voice in American conservatism, observed recently, the US is a “centre-Right country”. The conservative alternative should resonate. Instinctively, say conservatives, Americans know that the dream wasn’t built on Mr Obama’s idea of a “fair shake for all”, but on reward for hard work and a belief in America’s ability to perpetually reinvent itself; to always come back stronger.

Since the near-calamity of 2008, Mr Obama, with his big government ideas, has been smothering the prospect of a new America at birth. “The American people do not want the expansion of government and European social democracy. We know that. We just saw that,” Mr Krauthammer said on Fox News, referring to the drubbing handed to Obama and the Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections.

“There hasn’t been a radical change in the electorate. Romney has to make the case, not just, 'I know how to do jobs and create them because I did it at Bain. I’m going to deregulate. Obama’s a regulator.’ It’s about expansion of government, it’s about debt, it’s about stimulus, Keynesian experiments. It’s all out there and that’s the case he has to make. And he hasn’t. He wants to stick to biography. It’s not enough.”

It must be admitted that these are early days – and far too early to be reading too much into poll numbers. Close watchers of Mr Romney’s previous elections will argue that he has a record of keeping his powder dry until the critical moment, before letting fly with a barrage of negative advertisements – the political equivalent of “shock and awe”. It was a strategy that destroyed Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in the primaries.

But the notion of Mitt Romney as steely general, ordering his troops “to hold fire, boys, until you see the whites of their eyes” in the autumn campaign, isn’t washing. Palpably, it has failed to quell the rising fear on the Right that Mr Romney is in danger of ceding the initiative in the character stakes, of becoming another John Kerry: expertly coiffured but ultimately judged by the voters to be ineffectual and empty.

There have long been doubts about Mr Romney’s ability to perform on the biggest political stage and, after a brief rally following his confirmation as the nominee, they have not taken long to resurface. His failure last week to seize on the fact that the Supreme Court effectively declared the Obama health reforms a tax on the middle classes was the catalyst for the latest attempt to urge Mr Romney to join battle, or as Mr Murdoch put it, to “spell out restoration of the American dream and bash incompetent administration”.

Mr Romney is held back by his record in Massachusetts (where he implemented healthcare reforms very like Obamacare) but elections are a form of national theatre. Conviction, or even the appearance of it, can work wonders in getting voters to suspend their disbelief. The concern for those who long desperately to see the back of Mr Obama is that Mr Romney is on many other measures a weak candidate. Watch him woodenly working a crowd out on the stump, and it is a marvel how quickly he can dissipate the energy built up by his warm-up acts – a John McCain, say, or Chris Christie, the super-sized, straight-talking governor of New Jersey.

Even John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, who is one of Mr Romney’s biggest backers, admitted in the past week that the American people “aren’t going to fall in love with Mitt Romney”. The uncomfortable truth for Mr Romney is that US elections are a test of charisma, as much as of character, and the Bain man is short of the former. That might not matter if he had something better to offer. The American electorate fell starry-eyed in love with Barack Obama, but is now on the rebound. It should be ripe to pick up a tough, more practical choice of chief executive. Mr Romney’s record as a job creator at Bain Capital should help him on this but – just as in his first election in the 1994 senate race against Ted Kennedy – that, too, is being turned against him.

In one ad filling the airwaves of Ohio and Florida this week, a worker described being asked to build a stage at his Indiana paper products factory, only for Bain executives to walk in the next week and use it to fire everyone. “It was like building my own coffin,” he dead-panned. The charges stuck before, and if the polls from the swing states are correct, they seem to be sticking again. And yet the Romney camp has done little to counter the stream of ads depicting him as a heartless “vulture capitalist” who got rich while others lost jobs and pensions.

Mr Romney knows such ads can hurt him, as can attacks on his Swiss bank account and investment holdings on the Cayman Islands. By contrast, his beloved dad George Romney (whose 1968 presidential primary campaign imploded almost before it began) was the chief executive of American Motors Corporation at a time when Detroit was the Silicon Valley of its day.

It is true that management consultant is an infinitely tougher sell than captain of industry, but the thrust of the mounting criticisms is that Mr Romney needs to make his pitch. The worsening economic conditions might favour the challenger but the electoral mathematics shows that Mr Obama still has more possible routes to the magic 270 electoral college votes needed to keep the White House.

The message is clear. The voters are in pain; the Right is crying out for change, as the $100 million in donations that Mr Romney raised in June shows. People fear that for the first time in living memory children will enjoy a lower standard of living than their parents. They would vote for Old Nick himself if he could offer them a future. But if Mr Romney wants that job, he needs to fight for it.